“I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve accomplished nothing great in my life,” J.D. Vance writes in the introduction to his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, “certainly nothing that would justify a complete stranger paying money to read about it.” But with news that Donald Trump has tapped Vance to be his running mate, interest in the Ohio senator’s life and career—as well as the poorly received film adaptation of his memoir, which reportedly prompted Vance’s rightward tilt—has certainly spiked.
Vance first had the national spotlight trained on him when he published his book in 2016, not long before Trump was elected. In it, Vance reflects on his childhood in Middletown, Ohio, in a community at times ravaged by poverty and opioid addiction, as well as his self-appointed “hillbilly identity,” by way of his Appalachian grandparents in Jackson, Kentucky.
Though at the time he declared himself a “Never Trump guy,” Vance’s memoir was used to decipher how Trump had clinched the vote of poor, white America. “Anyone wanting to understand Trump’s rise or American inequality should read it,” tweeted Larry Summers, former treasury secretary of Bill Clinton and president of Harvard. But others prickled at Vance’s tendency to paint the Appalachian region in broad strokes. The New Republic’s Sarah Jones referred to Vance as “the False Prophet of Blue State America,” also known as “liberal media’s favorite white trash-splainer.” The week of Trump’s 2017 inauguration, Hillbilly Elegy sat atop the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list.
Just as The Apprentice made Trump palatable for American audiences, his running mate was given his own Hollywood vehicle when Hillbilly Elegy was adapted into a 2020 film. Directed by Ron Howard (Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind) and written by Vanessa Taylor (The Shape of Water), the movie follows Vance (played by Gabriel Basso and Owen Asztalos at various ages) as he travels from Yale back to his humble hometown amid familial strife between his grandmother Mamaw (Glenn Close) and mother Bev (Amy Adams). (Vanity Fair has reached out to reps for Howard, Taylor, Adams, and Close for comment.)
Although the movie was released on Netflix only a week after the 2020 presidential election, it strips away most of the political context of Vance’s book, from his own right-of-center leanings to the fact that Mamaw and Papaw were union Democrats (other than the time Papaw voted for Ronald Reagan in 1984). It also ends with a local-boy-makes-good spin that focuses on Vance’s ability to break out of the Rust Belt, start a family, and graduate Yale Law School. There is no mention of his future as a venture capitalist under the wing of Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, who donated $15 million to Vance’s Senate campaign.
“I expect the movie will do very well in Middle America, the Rust Belt and the South,” American Conservative columnist Rod Dreher told The Hollywood Reporter ahead of the movie’s release. “I am much less sure about coastal audiences. . . I sense that enough time has passed since the book’s publication that a lot of Blue State folks are going to intuitively associate the story with Trump, and come to it with a grudge, if they come to it at all.”
In the same story, WME partner Anna DeRoy, who represented Vance, said: “If you’re going to make a family drama and you’re going to cast movie stars, you’re going to make it about the characters. The political stuff is in there, but it’s subtle.” (It appears that DeRoy no longer represents Vance.)